Biomimetic cilia and flagella for lab-on-chip devices
Syed Khaderi (University of Cambridge), Sandeep Namdeo (), Jaap Den Toonder (Philips/TU-Eindhoven), Patrick Onck (University of Groningen)
Materials Design and Biomimetic Material Concepts
Tue 9:00 - 10:30
CIT 227
A rapidly growing field in biotechnology is the use of lab-on-a-chip devices to analyse biofluids. Such fluids have to be preprocessed (for example, mixed with other fluids) and transported to and from micro-chambers where the biochemical analyses are performed. The transport and manipulation of biofluids and individual cells in these systems is usually performed by downscaling conventional methods or by exploiting capillary, electro-osmotic or magnetohydrodynamic forces. In this work, we explore a new way to manipulate fluids and micro-objects in microfluidic systems, inspired by nature, through the magnetic actuation of artificial cilia and flagella. Fluid dynamics at the micrometer scale is dominated by viscosity rather than inertia. This has important consequences for fluid propulsion mechanisms. In particular, mechanical actuation will only be effective in propelling fluids if their motion is cyclic, but asymmetric in shape change (i.e. non-reciprocal). Nature has solved this problem by means of hair-like structures, cilia and flagella, whose beating pattern is non-reciprocal. The key challenge for nature’s artificial equivalent is to design the material system in such a way that a similar non-reciprocating motion will be generated. In this work we report on the computational design of magnetic artificial cilia and flagella, resulting in effective microfluid propulsion systems and biomimetic microswimmers [1, 2]. [1] J.M.J. den Toonder and P.R. Onck, Microfluidic manipulation with artificial/bioinspired cilia, Trends in Biotechnology, Vol. 31, pp. 8591 (2013). [2] S.N. Khaderi, C.B. Craus, J. Hussong, N. Schorr, J. Belardi, J. Westerweel, O. Prucker, J. Ruhe, J.M.J. den Toonder and P.R. Onck, Magnetically-actuated artificial cilia for microfluidic propulsion. Lab Chip, Vol. 11, pp. 2002–2010 (2011).